On Monday, November 26, 2001 10:48 AM Dwayne dwayne@pobox.com wrote:
>> In Britain, at least, some secessionists are
>> asserting themselves -- in Scotland and Wales.)
>
> But don't you see this as one state fragmenting into smaller ones?
It is that.
> It's
> hardly a leap towards libertarianism, seems like much the same system
> writ small to me, although I'm not overly familiar with the way the
> scottish system is set up (despite living with a scot). Or do you think
> this is the start of some sort of full-fledged devolutionary process?
I don't want to be overly optimistic, but, all things being equal, the
smaller a nation is -- economically, geographically, population-wise -- the
more it has to be rational in its policies. For example, a nation the size
of Delaware could not erect huge trade barriers to protect industries at
home. It would immediately impoverish it. Also, if taxes were very high
there as compared with its neighbors, it would lose population -- either
through legal emigration or the illegal kind. It would also lose foreign
investors and domestic money would try to flee as well.
Thus, secessionism can lead to more libertarian polities. There's no
guarantee here, but the likelihood is much higher.
To some extent, this explains why big nations like the US can practice
protectionism. Yes, protectionism is economically harmful, but the US has
large internal markets as well as many raw materials. Protectionism does
hurt the US, but not as much as it would hurt, say, Delaware if it decided
to secede from the Union. (The internal free trade inside the US acts like
a huge free trade zone too, so that helps to mitigate some of the problems
with external regulated trade. Of course, the US is really not a free trade
zone in toto. There are now ever more internal regulations on trade, but
for most of its history it was.)
Keep going too. If Wilmington seceded from Delaware and became its own
country, it would be even more insane for it to practice anti-free market
policies. Likewise, if a neighborhood in Wilmington seceded. Likewise, if
a household seceded from the neighborhood.
Thus, secession in its logical extreme would force people to behave much
more rationally with regard to socio-economic policies. They might not
always make the right choice, but the incentives and costs would be much
more alligned with libertarianism than statism. This is partly because it
becomes harder to externalize the costs and much easier to see what the
problem is. (In a large country like the US, it's easy, e.g., for the Fed
to inflate, but if the city of Wilmington, Delaware were a separate country,
the Bank of Wilmington would find it much harder to inflate its currency
given the effects would be much more readily noticeable and traceable to the
inflationary policy. In the US, even now, some people think there was no
inflationary boom during the 1990s that lead to the current bust.)
Cheers!
Daniel Ust
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
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